Hallo conlangers!

On 24.12.2015 23:24, Melroch wrote:

> I read that article now having nothing else to do, and I didn't believe my
> eyes. Hasn't the author understood anything? Tolkien's Elves can do evil,
> and at least the Noldor outright rebelled against the Valar.

It seems as if the author of that article (which I considered "good and 
useful" in relation to *post*-Tolkienian Elves, not as much in relation 
to Tolkien's work) has read only _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the 
Rings_ (or not even those but only has seen the movies based on them), 
which contain little evidence for Elves being capable of doing evil, but 
not _The Silmarillion_, which is pretty much all about Elves doing evil, 
and *what* kind of evil. Feanor certainly has wrought more havoc than 
any other character of _The Silmarillion_, Morgoth alone excluded.

> While it's
> true that an inordinate amount of Elvish evil was committed by or at the
> ultimate instigation of Feanor even Galadriel rebelled and was banned from
> the West, only to be redeemed by her instrumental help in overthrowing
> Sauron, and also I suspect because she rejected the Ring. The interesting
> thing is that unlike Men the Elves, least of all Feanor, willingly lend
> their ears and hands to evil. They must be manipulated to do so, and both
> Feanor and the Second Age Elven-smiths are snared by their pride in general
> and their pride in the things they have made.

Fine. They may be less easy to snare than Men, but they can be snared. 
And when they do evil, they do so at a grand scale. An Elf manipulated 
into evil wouldn't be a prettified orc; he'd be a subsidiary dark lord. 
The wisdom of the LotR Elves is learned the hard way through a long life 
of self-caused utter catastrophe.

> As for moral and other superiority both Feanor and Thingol and the
> Númenoreans fell to evil in great part because they thought they possessed
> it. Tolkien makes abundantly clear that even the Good Númenoreans are very
> susceptible to pride in their supposed superiority. All real crises in the
> history of Gondor are due to that flaw, and all their truly great leaders
> are great because they overcome it.

So it is - their position of strength and power make the Númenoreans and 
their descendants proud, and pride tends to turn them to evil.

> Much the same is true of the Elvish
> leaders. It is certainly no accident that Elrond's least sympathetic trait
> is his belief that his daughter is really too good for Aragorn. The closest
> Tolkien comes to saying all this explicitly is Faramir's speech to Frodo,
> but it is a very important theme in his work if you really look behind the
> surface. The mental poisons of Morgoth, Sauron and the Orks are greed and
> hate, which are simple flaws compared to pride and prejudice, which are the
> mental poisons of Tolkien's Good characters, which the truly good overcome.

Yep. Pride and prejudice are harder to overcome than greed and hate, and 
may result in greater wrongdoing. Orcs are just grunt troops, little 
else than hounds who would follow any master they can find; Feanor was a 
little Dark Lord in himself. And Saruman shows how even an Istar can 
fall on the road of pride, the same way Feanor did.

> I'm sure Tolkien wanted to say something important about his contemporaries
> here.

Certainly, as all good imaginative fiction does. Works of fantasy and 
science fiction that have nothing to tell about the real world is in 
most cases superfluous. While he rejected the notion that _The Lord of 
the Rings_ was an allegory of World War II, it was certainly written 
under the *impression* of that war (and of course of World War I, where 
JRRT was actively involved and survived by sheer luck, while in WWII, he 
sat at home worrying about the fates of his sons and the freedom of his 
country).

The D&D Elves actually have pretty little in common with Tolkien's Elves 
(and most later RPGs and novels added little to them). Sure, they are 
more akin to the Quendi than they are to Victorian fairies or Santa 
Claus's elves. But what are they? I can't say what Gygax and Arneson had 
in mind when they added them (and the Dwarves and Halflings) to the 
game, but it has been said that these races were added as an 
afterthought to make the game marketable to millions of Tolkien fans. In 
practice, they are essentially a smug and blasé travesty of hippies and 
Greens, and I have met more roleplayers who dislike them than ones who 
like them.

My own Elves are, as you certainly know, just humans, and meant to show 
the possibilities of the human condition - something I just could not do 
with a race that was intrinsically "better" than ordinary humans. They 
have learned to deal with the dark sides of the human condition, but 
they are not insusceptible to evil; in fact, pride and perfectionism 
eventually undermine the stability of the Commonwealth of the Elves, and 
its downfall has internal causes.

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